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The CX industry is an incredibly dynamic one. Its ever-changing nature means that, in order for businesses to thrive, adapting new technologies and meeting contemporary customer desires are absolute musts.

Putting an end to long hold times via our call-back solutions is certainly a part of this dynamic process, and we see the tremendous impacts of it every day with our customers. Of the many success stories, we’re particularly excited to share this one: Payless Furniture.

Every call center faces the problem of unpredictable spikes in call volume. Sometimes the causes are understood, even anticipated. However, in many cases these peak periods come as a shock to the system. The reality is that voice remains the most preferred channel for customers, but its popularity comes at a price: long hold times.

Unfortunately, the effect of this on the customer experience is significant: 60% of customers will abandon a call after just one minute of waiting on hold. If you want to improve customer loyalty and keep your CSAT scores healthy, you’ll need to make sure you have the right safety nets in place. Continue reading →

Last week, Fonolo hosted an insightful live discussion on the top call center metrics you need to be tracking . This expert panel discussed NPS for customer satisfaction, popular call center metrics, the future of the voice channel, and so much more! To save you some time, we’ve extracted video snippets showcasing highlights from the discussion.

Everyone knows how important it is to monitor metrics, but do you know how to pick the right ones, and implement an effective strategy? The trick to successfully manage metrics is to specifically identify which data points are relevant to you, and to analyze what that data means to your organization. What makes this task so daunting for contact centers is the sheer number of metrics to choose from: Service Level, Customer Satisfaction Score, Abandon Rate, First Call Resolution, Average Speed to Answer, and the list goes on.

Ultimately, tracking the right numbers is essential to managing a well performing contact center. However, as call centers serve an increasing number of channels and agents are stretched into new roles, the act of choosing the right metrics becomes even more confusing. Continue reading →

Velocity Credit Union is based in Austin and has served the area since 1947. It is one of the largest financial institutions in the state of Texas with over $840 million in assets, and provides personalized banking to more than 84,000 members across six local branches.

Velocity takes pride in making its members feel valued, and in creating a positive customer experience, however their current service offering was not meeting these goals. Velocity was struggling with long hold times and a high number of abandoned calls. They thought they had to replace their legacy call center system to correct this problem – which would be costly and time consuming. Continue reading →

In a perfect world, your contact center would never put callers on hold. If hold time is unavoidable, the next best thing to do is offer a call-back option. Removing the frustration of hold time will lead to happier callers. For many contact centers, this improvement in the customer experience is the primary, or even sole, motivation for adding call-backs. (If you need a reminder of how much callers dislike waiting on hold, just take a moment to scan the tweets at onholdwith.com.) But there’s another angle to this story.

When deployed correctly, call-backs can deliver concrete ROI through several paths: lowered abandon rates, shorter handle time, reduced telco cost and more consistent call volume. In this new eBook, we’ll present these paths to ROI one-by-one, and walk through the calculation needed to build a business case for your organization. To make the math easier to follow, this document will use a fictitious company “ExampleCo” for all the calculations. It will draw from our experiences deploying Fonolo’s cloud-based call-backs, but the concepts are equally applicable to any call-back solution. Continue reading →

Credit unions must be competitive in order to stand out from those big mean banks; they must establish a truly unique offering to attract new membership. One way to successfully accomplish this is through the member experience. Since credit unions tend to serve local communities, it’s important for each member to feel appreciated by their financial institution. Therefore, customer service plays a significant role in the relationship members have with their credit union. For example, if your credit union suffers from long hold times, it’s unlikely your members will feel like you’re taking their needs seriously. Also, it’s nearly impossible to attract new members if they can’t even get a hold of you.

A poor customer experience is something no company can afford to take lightly. Especially since bad experiences are so costly: 62% of customers will actually consider switching to a competitor!

Unfortunately, it’s hard for contact centers to deliver a great experience after they’ve put a customer on hold. Most callers will lose patience quickly, resulting in an angry caller and a frustrated agent. But reducing the amount of time your customers stay on hold will not only satisfy your customers, and make your agents happier, it will also significantly reduce your abandon rates!

Many call center platforms today offer some form of call-back functionality. That means if your hold times are long, your callers have the option to get a call at a later time instead of waiting for an agent. These built-in call-back features work by holding the caller’s place in line (“virtual queuing”) so the total wait time is the same. You can think of this as “ASAP” call-backs.

Fonolo offers this flavor of call-back (to a huge variety of call centers), but we also offer a more advance flavor, one that is rarely part of the built-in version: “Scheduled Call-Backs”. This flavor allows the caller to choose a specific time slot for a future conversation. This small change in strategy is deceptively powerful. In fact, we at Fonolo have come to think of it as a call center “superpower”.

Have you ever wondered why credit unions continue to rank the highest for customer satisfaction compared to other financial institutions? The reason for their continued success is simply because they work diligently on building a strong customer experience for their members. But when unpredictable events occur, even the best in the industry need a helping hand. Dealing with a spike in call volume or a shortage of agents can be detrimental to the call center experience. The result is typically a rise in hold time, an increase in abandonment, angry callers, and stressed out agents.

Fortunately, there’s an easy and affordable approach that call centers can take to protect themselves against these common scenarios. Continue reading →